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My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.
Elizabeth Bowen
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Elizabeth Bowen
Age: 73 †
Born: 1899
Born: June 7
Died: 1973
Died: February 22
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Dublin city
Elisabeth Bowen
Without
Prepared
Writing
Normal
Something
Called
Think
Books
Thinking
Society
Born
Substitute
May
Substitutes
Book
Relation
More quotes by Elizabeth Bowen
... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.
Elizabeth Bowen
Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.
Elizabeth Bowen
If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
Elizabeth Bowen
Darling, I don't want you I've got no place for you I only want what you give. I don't want the whole of anyone.... What you want is the whole of me-isn't it, isn't it?-and the whole of me isn't there for anybody. In that full sense you want me I don't exist.
Elizabeth Bowen
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
Elizabeth Bowen
But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.
Elizabeth Bowen
Education is not so important as people think.
Elizabeth Bowen
Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
Though not all reading children grow up to be writers, I take it that most creative writers must in their day have been reading children.
Elizabeth Bowen
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
Elizabeth Bowen
I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.
Elizabeth Bowen
The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.
Elizabeth Bowen
Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.
Elizabeth Bowen
The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.
Elizabeth Bowen
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.
Elizabeth Bowen
in my experience one thing you don't learn from is anything anyone set up to be a lesson what you are to know you pick up as you go along.
Elizabeth Bowen
Every love has a poetic relevance of its own each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.
Elizabeth Bowen
It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.
Elizabeth Bowen
Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.
Elizabeth Bowen
Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.
Elizabeth Bowen
